Great Sparrow Campaign
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Great Sparrow Campaign
Communist China was made up of a whole lot of campaigns, a variety of nation-wide movement to spurt the country forward in order to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of their rate of industrialization. We are talking about more than half a century ago here, when China was still very much dominated by Communists, when every Chinese were given little red handbooks to teach them the proper conducts, everything from the way they spoke to the way they dressed - everything. One of the many campaigns during that period of time was the infamous Great Leap Forward, a concept thought up by the father of Communism in China, Chairman Mao himself. Chairman Mao is arguably a brilliant man, a man that kicked out the original dictator of China and called himself the ruler of the country with Russia behind his back. Inspired by Stalin's ability to push the country forward in five year increments in such a rapid pace, Chairman Mao wanted his own campaign to push things forward as well, which was how The Great Leap Forward first began.
Communist China was made up of a whole lot of campaigns, a variety of nation-wide movement to spurt the country forward in order to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of their rate of industrialization. We are talking about more than half a century ago here, when China was still very much dominated by Communists, when every Chinese were given little red handbooks to teach them the proper conducts, everything from the way they spoke to the way they dressed - everything. One of the many campaigns during that period of time was the infamous Great Leap Forward, a concept thought up by the father of Communism in China, Chairman Mao himself. Chairman Mao is arguably a brilliant man, a man that kicked out the original dictator of China and called himself the ruler of the country with Russia behind his back. Inspired by Stalin's ability to push the country forward in five year increments in such a rapid pace, Chairman Mao wanted his own campaign to push things forward as well, which was how The Great Leap Forward first began.
The Great Sparrow Campaign is merely a part of the Great Leap Forward campaign, which really was a great leap backwards. Sparrows were eating up the seeds in the country, and the farmers were really troubled by that problem initially. So Chairman Mao thought up a great idea to solve this problem, and that was to encourage the Chinese people to eradicate the sparrows in any way they can. Because sparrows cannot sustain a long flight in the air without suffering from heart attack, the farmers would bang their pots and pans together furiously just to scare the sparrows away. They managed to do that very well back then, and actually managed to nearly wipe out the sparrow population in China along with other "pests" like mosquitoes, rats and whatnot. But the Chinese government back then failed to foresee another big cloud of problem coming their way with the death of the sparrows: locusts. Sparrows are locusts' primary predators, and locusts came one year and wiped out all the crops that they killed the sparrows to protect. So the crops were wiped out, there weren't enough food in the country, 30 million people died from starvation - true story.
That's a little something that was left out of the history textbook, or even one of Curtis Thomson's informative lectures. I read the above on Wikipedia, I guess I should have studied through that website in the first place, instead of plowing my way through pages after pages of boring text and pictures. It's funny how, when you read about history, the actions of people were based upon lies and stupidity most of the time. These so-called campaigns always come back to slap the country in the face, but the government almost always finds a way to get themselves out of the sticky situation by pointing fingers in a different direction to distract the people from the problem at hand. When the Great Leap Forward failed in China, what did the government do? They blamed it on the West, with no apparent reasons really. Sure, the West has been less than kind to the Chinese, or the rest of the world, but then it's strange and amusing how people in the past just blindly bought whatever the government said. Such a thing doesn't just happen in Communist China though, or in history textbooks. It happens in a liberal country in the present tense too, and we all know which country I am talking about.
Seven weeks after the infamous terrorist escaped from the detention center back in February, he is still very much at large and nobody has caught him yet. For the past seven weeks, nobody knew how the whole fiasco happened, and the government was determined to keep their lips sealed for the time being. All they did was to distribute fliers and posters on the street, calling this man a dangerous person capable of terrorist acts, and then telling us to aid in his arrest without telling us how they themselves screwed up in the first place. A lot has been criticized about the government over the span of seven weeks regarding their lack of transparency, a little something the government here regard as their pride and joy. When the incident first happened, the first thing the government did was to tell the press not to say anything, tell the people involved not to tell anything, and to tell the rest of the country that they will catch the guy. It's week number seven, he's still on the run. The funny thing is, they still believe that the man is still on the island, camped up somewhere.
A couple of weeks ago, the government decided to release some information about our escaped friend that was supposed to help identify him a little easier. Here's what the government allowed the press to publish, and I am not joking here. Right across the front page was the headline about how the man has a mole on his cheek, as if that is going to make a significant difference at all. It was as good as telling us that the man is a man, has two eyes and two legs, has two arms and has a penis. They have plastered his poster all around the country, I am pretty sure we know how he looks like. A mole identified is not really going to make a difference at all, really, and that was supposed to be a classified secret of the country. What we really wanted to know of the past seven weeks was how it happened.
Seven weeks later, the government finally decided to give up information regarding the whole escape, but it is perhaps seven weeks too late. It was featured in an article which I didn't bother to finish reading in the papers, simply because of how I felt as if I was being treated like an idiot of sorts. Three critical reasons were flashed out on the front page regarding his escape, and I have already guessed as much without them even being transparent about this whole incident. It just felt as if the government, instead of spending seven weeks to gather enough comprehensive information, spent the time coming up with a plausible story regarding his escape. The "how" really isn't all that important to a person like myself, but I guess the transparency of the government is. In the case of this government, transparency is like a clear window being placed in front of a brick wall - you still can't see anything through the transparency, anyway.
Like the Great Sparrow Campaign, however, the government is going to blame its failure on somebody else. Blame it on the security cameras that weren't functioning at the time of his escape, blame it on the guards who took five minutes to realize that the water was running for way too long inside the toilet cubicle, blame it on the lousy fences built around the detention - blame everything, but their inability review security measures until it was too late. They point fingers at everybody else, and the people are going to be directed in that direction because the government is supposed to be right all the time. It doesn't matter if the distraction doesn't make any sense at all, the people are going to make sense out of it anyway because humans tend to fill in the gaps, we draw our own conclusions, we believe what we want to believe.
Conspiracy theorists are like wet blankets at a party, they suck. There are conspiracies floating around about how the government actually allowed the man to escape, or how the man actually died in the prison, and was then told to the rest of the world that he escaped. A lot of these stories are floating around on the internet or over coffee tables, but one thing is for sure regarding this whole ordeal: questions are not being answered, and I guess as citizens that is the least that we deserve. The answers are like the sparrows here, being murdered and killed for a greater cause, a cause that involves the pride of the nation. In truth, the murder of the answers is going to backfire someday, it is going to happen for sure. And when the shit hits the fan, some guys run and some guys stay. Is our government going to stand with their two feet on the ground when the locusts come?
This entry was posted
on Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 1:59 AM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
2:05 PM
This comment has been removed by the author.